Designing Black Futures
Jonathan Key
Brooklyn, New York
Virtual
November 18, 2021
3:45-4:00 p.m. Pacific — Networking
4:00-5:45 p.m. Pacific — Presentation
Crafted using InDesign, Black Futures combines original artwork, essays, roundtable discussions, one-on-one interviews, poetry, and other forms of expression to pay tribute to the myriad modes of communication that have been championed by Black creatives from the height of the AIDS crisis into the speculative future.
The design is a compendium organized with multiple ways of accessing the variety of entries. From indices to physical hyperlinks, the book flows in a non-linear yet interconnected fashion.
In constructing the book, the authors asked: “What does it mean to be Black and alive right now?” In its final form, the book includes a luscious set of recipes, archival tweets and more from over 100 contributors that tells the story of the radical, imaginative, and resilient world that emerging and renowned Black artists are producing today.
And in designing the book, over the three-year process, the designers asked: “How do we construct a non-linear experience to hold the various type of content to encompass the vastness of Blackness in InDesign?
About the Presenter
Jonathan Key
Jon(athan) Key is an artist, designer, and writer originally from Seale, Alabama. After receiving his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, Jon began his design career at Grey Advertising in New York City before moving on to work with HBO, Nickelodeon, and The Public Theater. Now he is co-founder of the Brooklyn–based design studio Morcos Key with Wael Morcos.
As an educator, Jon has taught at Maryland Institute College of Art, Parsons School of Design, and currently teaches at Cooper Union. Jon is also a co-founder and design director of Codify Art, a multidisciplinary collective dedicated to creating, producing, supporting, and showcasing work by artists of color, particularly women, queer, and trans artists of color.
Jon was selected for Forbes 30 under 30 Art and Style list for 2020 and was the Frank Staton Chair in Graphic Design at Cooper Union 2018-2019. His work has been featured in Jeffery Deitch Gallery, the Armory Show, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic.
